A library by the book

THE NEW CRITERION, December 2022

A library by the book

On the politicization of the American library.

Adapted for The Wall Street Journal of November 11, 2022

In 2006 the American Library Association issued a button to its members. It read, “radical, militant librarian.” We should have taken the message at its word. The American library, until recently a refuge of neutral quietude, has become a booming battleground in the culture wars.

In 2018 the ALA dropped the name of Laura Ingalls Wilder from its annual children’s literature award. The reason? The supposed “culturally insensitive portrayals” in her landmark Little House on the Prairie series. Three years later, the organization published its “Resolution to Condemn White Supremacy and Fascism as Antithetical to Library Work.” The edict claimed that “libraries have upheld and encouraged white supremacy both actively through discriminatory practices and passively through a misplaced emphasis on neutrality.” The proclamation charged the ALA’s “Working Group on Intellectual Freedom and Social Justice” to “review neutrality rhetoric and identify alternatives.”

The quiet, neutral library was out. Full-throated progressive politics were in. As Emily Drabinski, a self-described “Marxist lesbian” who was recently elected president of the ALA, stated on her campaign website: “So many of us find ourselves at the ends of our worlds. The consequences of decades of unchecked climate change, class war, white supremacy, and imperialism have led us here.”

The condemnation of the history of the American library, by its own gatekeepers, has done more than bring “Drag Queen Story Hour” to every children’s reading room. It has also upended the traditional role of the library as an organization primarily dedicated to the acquisition, preservation, and circulation of books. This is a radical overhaul, and it has been brought to us by some of America’s largest cultural philanthropies.

In October the Mellon Foundation hosted a panel discussion on the American library featuring Mellon president Elizabeth Alexander, the ALA executive director Tracie D. Hall, and the Los Angeles City Librarian John F. Szabo. “Library workers are on the front lines of some of our most pressing social justice issues,” began the discussion. They are “no longer relegated to the reference desk.” What does this all mean? For one, that today’s librarians mock “the shushing part” of the traditional library: “I can’t think of too many contemporary library spaces I’ve been in where the librarian is going to be a shusher,” said Hall. “I probably was the librarian that others might have wanted to shush.” Through sewing classes, coworking spaces, and “incubators,” the panel spoke of “fulfilling the promise of what libraries were meant to be in terms of equity.” “It is our responsibility to ensure that no one is left out of the voting process,” Hall added. “That is one of our core values at the American Library Association.” And by actively appealing to voters on one side of the political spectrum, the library organization helps move election outcomes in a desired direction.

As librarians now champion controversial books such as the graphic novel Flamer, they also call parental attempts to limit what children read as evidence of a “period of unprecedented book banning and censorship”—one that “far eclipses even the McCarthy era.” Meanwhile, truly deplatformed titles, such as When Harry Became Sally, Ryan T. Anderson’s critique of modern transgender theory that Amazon erased from its e-commerce platform, are never mentioned in these one-sided agonies. “This is the third great wave of librarianship and libraries—as a social project,” concluded Hall. What was, until recently, a widely popular American institution has been nearly broken by unrestrained progressive politicization.

“I suspect that the human species—the only species—teeters at the verge of extinction, yet that the Library—enlightened, solitary, infinite, perfectly unmoving, armed with precious volumes, pointless, incorruptible, and secret—will endure.” It is easy to see how Jorge Luis Borges in the early 1940s, in his oft-quoted short story “The Library of Babel,” might have drawn such a conclusion. Yet today it appears that the library, especially the library that is “enlightened, solitary, infinite, perfectly unmoving, armed with precious volumes, pointless, incorruptible, and secret,” is the entity that most teeters at the verge of extinction.

It is a crisis of the Left’s own devising, one designed to turn the library into a scarred landscape. It is also based on a straw-man argument, with rhetoric disconnected from the historical record. Far from upholding “fascism” and “white supremacy,” the American library has been, in fact, one of the country’s most enlightened and democratic institutions.

Through what remains of this legacy, beyond the spurious “banned books” displays and the circulation-desk sermonizing, today’s libraries can still be places of reverie, uplift, and reflection. This effect is due not just to the abundance of books that are—at least for now—still available for perusal. It is also an effect of the library building itself, its history of form, which records the values of an earlier era in bricks and stone.

For its ubiquity and richness, especially in those examples that survive from before the Second World War, the American library building stands as a reflection of the country’s enlightened calling. Over the nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth, library design paired historicized style with the latest innovative solutions for the safe housing and circulation of its collections. The references to the history of art and civilization that these buildings displayed on their faces—and the great expense dedicated to their creation and upkeep by their underwriters—reflected a reverence for the culture of the book contained within.

Henri Labrouste, Bibliothèque Ste.-Geneviéve, Paris, 1859, Print, from Memoirs of Libraries, London.

American Libraries: 1730–1950, written by Kenneth Breisch for a series by the Library of Congress and published in 2017, tells this history in a visual and compelling way.1 While the eighteenth century saw the creation of important American private and subscription libraries, only Benjamin Franklin’s Library Company of Philadelphia (founded in 1731) and the New York Society Library (founded in 1754) had buildings dedicated to their collections by the turn of the nineteenth century. America’s interest in library design began in earnest after 1800. Over the following century and into the early years of the twentieth, libraries took the country by storm. Planners found inspiration in the grand mid-nineteenth-century examples of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris (designed by Henri Labrouste and constructed between 1844–50) and the Reading Room of the British Museum in London (Sydney Smirke, 1854–57). American library construction took off after the Civil War to reach the pinnacle of the movement as seen in such edifices as the main branch of the Boston Public Library (McKim, Mead & White, 1895), the main branch of the New York Public Library (Carrère & Hastings, 1911), and Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library (James Gamble Rogers, 1931).

Unlike the museum, the library is an ancient form. The Ambrosian Library in Milan (Lelio Buzzi and Francesco Maria Richini, 1603–09) and the Bodleian Library at Oxford (Thomas Holt, 1610–13) provided the “hall model” for early American library construction, one that lined the high walls of the main rooms with books. Centuries later, private showcase collections such as New York’s J. Pierpont Morgan Library (McKim, Mead & White, 1902–06), Rhode Island’s John Carter Brown Library (Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, 1904), California’s Huntington Library (Myron Hunt, 1920), and Washington’s Folger Shakespeare Library (Paul P. Cret and Alexander B. Trowbridge, 1928–32) continued the tradition of the Renaissance treasure-house design.

As a modification of the hall design, the alcove model, with double-height C-shaped book walls, became the American standard by the mid-nineteenth century. At Harvard, Gore Hall (Richard Bond, 1837–41; demolished in 1913 for the construction of Widener Library) became the university’s first freestanding library and a standard of alcove design. The form was continued in Yale’s Dwight Hall (Henry Austin, 1842–47; converted into the Dwight Memorial Chapel in 1930–31) and the successive buildings of the New York Society Library of 1840 and 1856. Merging the literary and ecclesiastical, both Gore and Dwight Halls drew their inspiration from King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, England.

Two influential manuals of the 1840s—A. F. Schmidt’s Handbuch der Bibliothekswissenschaft (1840) and Léopold Auguste Constantin Hesse’s Bibliothéconomie (1841)—encouraged multistory alcove design. Yet it was the widely emulated work of Henry Hobson Richardson, a onetime Harvard undergraduate who had studied in Gore Hall, that assured the alcove’s popularity, thanks to his library designs for the Massachusetts towns of Woburn, North Easton, Quincy, and Malden (1876–85). With its monumental ashlar masonry supporting fanciful arches and turrets, the Richardsonian Romanesque-revival style can still be seen in libraries throughout New England.

Not everyone was a supporter of Richardson’s alcove system—in particular those librarians who worked with collections housed in these arrangements. Justin Winsor, the superintendent of the Boston Public Library from 1868 to 1877, and William Frederick Poole, the librarian of the Boston Athenaeum from 1856 to 1869, were both critical of multi-story book halls and alcove shelving for their inefficient use of space, the challenge of retrieving the volumes, and the uneven heating of the rooms, which would often cook the books on the higher shelves. Their solution was the more utilitarian stack system, which located books in dedicated spaces on multiple tiers of iron shelves. The British Museum Reading Room employed, in part, such a multi-tiered system.

As American universities began to emulate the research-based German model, library collections grew. A more modular and efficient stack system soon became a necessity. Gore Hall was built in 1841 to house forty-four thousand books—the extent of Harvard’s collection at the time. The building was filled by 1863 and supplemented by a stack annex, the first in America, in 1876. Nevertheless, by 1910 an architectural survey determined that “no amount of tinkering can make it really good.” As with other alcove libraries, Gore was said to be “hopelessly overcrowded” and “intolerably hot in summer.” In 1913 Harvard demolished Gore and replaced the influential nineteenth-century complex with Horace Trumbauer’s Harry E. Widener Memorial Library, with metal stacks capable of storing over 3.5 million volumes. What was lost in bibliographic visualization—with the architectural use of books now replaced by card catalogues—such stack libraries gained in essential storage and efficiency. By the time of the construction of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, its Gothic Revival façade concealed a fourteen-story stack tower capable of housing five million volumes.

Thomas Jefferson was a man ahead of his time—in library- as well as nation-building. His legacy is woven into the story of the American library in more ways than one. By the early years of the republic, Jefferson had amassed a personal collection of six to seven thousand volumes. It was the largest and most extensive library in the country at the time. After the British army sacked Washington, D.C., and burned the Capitol in 1814, destroying the congressional library housed within, Jefferson sold his collection to the federal government a year later. Even though a second fire destroyed two-thirds of these volumes in 1851, Jefferson’s collection continues to form the nucleus of the Library of Congress, which has grown to become the largest library collection in the world.

Jefferson Reading Room, Library of Congress. Photo: Carol Highsmith, 2009.

Jefferson’s library influence continued with his designs for his University of Virginia. In 1822, construction began on his Rotunda library. The design departed from the hall model and adopted the shape of the ancient Roman Pantheon to form a focal point for his university’s classically designed Academical Village. When completed in 1828, two years after Jefferson’s death on July 4, 1826, and as the final and most monumental building on the new campus, the two-story Rotunda became the first freestanding academic library in the country.

Half a century later, library designers returned to Jefferson’s classical vernacular and the rotunda form to create some of the greatest monuments of American library architecture. Again Sydney Smirke’s innovative British Museum Reading Room of 1856 provided the model for a domed central rotunda featuring a panoptic administration area at the center with freestanding bookstacks surrounding a core. Smirke’s innovative reading room, the first to use iron stacks, featured twenty-five miles of reference shelving with twenty thousand popular circulating volumes arranged in numbered alcoves a floor below.

When the U.S. government authorized a competition for a new Library of Congress building in 1873, the winning design coalesced around a similar rotunda-and-stack arrangement. Completed twenty-five years later in 1897, what is now known as the loc’s Thomas Jefferson Building spared no expense in its construction and decorative program. Edward Casey, the son of Thomas Lincoln Casey, the engineer who oversaw the library’s construction before his death in 1896, attended to the library’s lavish assembly of sculptures, murals, and mosaics. Illustrations on its walls depict the evolution of the book from the oral tradition through the invention of the printing press. The collar of its central dome features allegories of the world’s civilizations. Surrounding this program are forty-three miles of shelving manufactured by the Snead & Company Iron Works of Louisville, Kentucky, which can accommodate two million volumes.

The Library of Congress’s rich artistic program was arguably surpassed at the Boston Public Library, where Charles McKim tasked Puvis de Chavannes with producing a mural cycle for the library’s grand staircase. Puvis created the work relying on measurements sent by McKim and a sample of the yellow Siena marble to match the tonalities of the staircase enclosure. Using a scale model of the staircase and working on canvas in his French studio, the seventy-two-year-old artist created a cycle of paintings that were then shipped to Boston and adhered by his assistants to the walls. The long cycle atop the entrance to Bates Hall presents “The Muses of Inspiration Hail[ing] the Spirit, the Harbinger of Light.” Surrounding panels depict allegories of Philosophy, Astronomy, History, Chemistry, Physics, and Pastoral, Dramatic, and Epic Poetry. Below, carved lions by Louis Saint-Gaudens guard this grand staircase.

In the years after the completion of the loc’s Jefferson building, American architects revisited the rotunda model in even more impressive distillations of the classical style as taught by the École des Beaux-Arts. In the first decade of the twentieth century, two institutions—New York University and Columbia—developed new uptown campuses that had many parallels. Most notable were the domed rotunda libraries at their core: nyu’s Gould Memorial Library of 1896–1903 and Columbia’s Low Memorial Library of 1909. Both designed by the firm of McKim, Mead & White, each building carries the sensibility of one side of the partnership, with McKim’s restrained, detailed classicism on display at Low and White’s theatrical exuberance at Gould.

Beyond the triumphant designs of America’s turn-of-the-century central libraries, it was the development of the smaller branch library that arguably had the greatest effect on twentieth-century literacy and education. As early as 1885, William Frederick Poole was advocating for smaller circulating libraries, ones that might contain thirty thousand volumes and be easily accessible to the American reader. A supporter of libraries of all sizes, the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie answered this call in the early years of the twentieth century in ways that changed the landscape of the American library. By 1917, Carnegie and his foundation, which he started in 1911, had endowed 1,679 library buildings in the United States. In New York City alone, he spent $5.2 million to construct sixty-seven neighborhood branch libraries. In segregated Tennessee, he funded a Negro Branch library. At the request of Booker T. Washington, he donated $20,000 for the library at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute. The ubiquitous construction of these Carnegie libraries, mostly classical in style, called for a simple panoptic design where “one librarian can oversee the entire library from a central point,” in the words of James Bertram, Carnegie’s personal secretary.

Through an astonishing combination of municipal underwriting and philanthropic giving (New Hampshire became the first state to authorize taxation for libraries in 1849), today there are 5,400 libraries with a thousand or more books in the United States. What has been lost in this abundance is an understanding of the forces that created it and an appreciation for the styles that formed it. Following the Second World War, library designers turned away from historical models to look to the modern office building and department store for inspiration, with disastrous effects. The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale (Gordon Bunshaft, 1963) and the Phillips Exeter Academy Library (Louis Kahn, 1972) are the rare exceptions to this general rule.

Departing from the simple flagstone design of Franklin Roosevelt’s “presidential library” (Louis Simon, 1939–40)—the first such executive initiative—the libraries of Lyndon Johnson (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1967–71) and Bill Clinton (Polshek Partnership, 2000–04) are brutalist and impenetrable. The same goes for the James Madison Memorial Building (De Witt, Poor & Shelton, 1966–81), the much-criticized extension of the Library of Congress built at a cost of $131 million, where the first challenge is finding the monolith’s front door. Even after the government requested a review of the design by the American Institute of Architects in 1967, little changed in its final construction.

Detroit Publishing Company, Main reading room, the New York Public Library, ca. 1910, Dry plate negative, Library of Congress.

Now a radical “third great wave” seeks to wash over the American library to complete its transformation into a “social project.” A decade ago, the leadership of the New York Public Library unveiled a real estate consolidation scheme called the “Central Library Plan.” The aim was to transform the library’s flagship research branch—arguably the finest integration of public spaces and book storage in the country—by gutting its stacks. By removing the “seven floors of outdated bookshelves under the Rose Main Reading Room,” read the announcement, the plan promised to transform the reference library into a newly circulating “people’s palace.” Meanwhile millions of books from the library’s “core research collections” would be moved off-site—undermining the legacy of John Jacob Astor, who left the initial bequest of $400,000 for the foundation and support of a free public reference library in 1848.

An eleventh-hour appeal by the architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable and others tanked the scheme, but the episode reveals the lengths to which library leaders will now go to destroy America’s great history of literary access for progressive ends. For them the real problem is not “book banning” but the easy availability of books they despise and the history these books represent, which our great library collections offer up neutrally, and impartially, by design. A library of the book, by the book, and for the book is the ultimate defense against their control—and the true democratic legacy of this American institution.

1. American Libraries: 1730–1950, by Kenneth Breisch; W. W. Norton & Company, 320 pages, $75.

Spanish Class

El Jaleo (1882), by John Singer Sargent, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

THE SPECTATOR WORLD EDITION, OCTOBER 2022

John Singer Sargent comes to Spain

The artist created his own synthetic Spanish vision

One of the great achievements of Spanish art is in its use of black. No other national school harnessed the dark arts to such effect. In Spanish painting, the color black might convey shadow, or the mystery of the unseen, while at the same time presenting a brooding presence, a dark mass right there on the surface.

Just look at “Las Meninas,” Diego Velázquez’s masterpiece of 1656. Now consider the subject. Is it the five-year-old infanta? Her ladies in waiting, the “Meninas” of the title? The painter portrayed at his easel? The infanta’s royal parents in the reflection of a mirror? Some unseen viewer interrupting this tableau? I might suggest that the darkness, obscuring most of the picture, surrounding and pressing on the fragments of light that barely hold this composition together, is as much a subject as anything else. The blackness draws us in, not through what it depicts, but by what it obscures.

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was the son of American expatriates. Born in Florence, he was educated in Paris and lived the majority of his working career in London. But he went back to black more than once, through his extensive study of Spanish painting and a lifelong fascination with Spanish culture. The underlying thesis of Sargent and Spain, a major exhibition at Washington’s National Gallery of Art — opening this October and on view to January 2023, later traveling to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco — is that the painter’s many passages through Spain not only gave him his subject matter but also informed his painterly style. For anyone who has wondered about Sargent’s Spanish affinities, this exhibition reconstructs those sojourns and looks to the sources of his synthetic Spanish vision.

Hispanophilia permeated the Romantic nineteenth century. Spain presented itself as a “country untroubled by modern life, with a profound sense of the austere — melancholic and sacred, timeless or at least premodern,” write Elaine Kilmurray and Richard Ormond in the exhibition’s illuminating catalog. “Spain became a locus for this Romantic sensibility and an imagined Iberian past was, in part, created to satisfy it.”

In the industrializing culture of the West, books such as Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra (1832); George Borrow’s Zincali, or, An Account of the Gypsies of Spain (1841) and his Bible in Spain (1843); Théophile Gautier’s Voyage en Espagne (1845); and Richard Ford’s Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1845) all set the mood of this nostalgic Spanish vision. Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830) and Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875) famously brought the romance of Spain to the modern stage.

But for the painters of the nineteenth century, Velázquez was their modelo ideal. A pilgrimage to study and copy his paintings in Madrid at the Prado became a must. From 1879 through 1912, Sargent made seven extended visits to Spain. The Prado was his first stop. According to the museum’s copyist register, Sargent here drew nine works by Velázquez and one by Ribera. As with Manet, who had made a similar visit to Spain some fourteen years earlier, Velázquez “exerted a lasting influence on his portraiture,” write Kilmurray and Ormond. Further influenced by his painting teachers Carolus-Duran and Léon Bonnat, both followers of the seventeenth-century Spanish master, Sargent was soon said to be “Velázquez come to life again.”

Curated by Sarah Cash, the associate curator of American and British Paintings at the National Gallery of Art, along with Kilmurray and Ormond, who authored the artist’s catalog raisonné, Sargent and Spain brings together 140 examples of the artist’s oils, watercolors, drawings and photographs, starting with the artist’s youthful dives into the Spanish darkness. In its haunting forms, his early “Spanish Dance” of 1879-82, here on loan, seems so Iberian in style that it represents one of the rare examples of a work not made by a Spaniard in the collection of New York’s Hispanic Society.

In 1882 Sargent brought together his many Spanish studies to compose his breakthrough oil “El Jaleo.” Now in the collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the painting of an up-lit flamenco dancer did not travel from Boston, but its many studies are here on loan from the Gardner. Due to its ambitious size and revealing subject matter, the painting proved to be the sensation of the 1882 Paris Salon. The artist became “the most talked-about painter in Paris,” according to a contemporary account on “The Salon — From an Englishman’s Point of View.”

It is remarkable to consider that this most Spanish of images was painted in Paris by an Italian-born American with a model “who was neither Spanish nor a dancer,” notes the art historian Nancy G. Heller in the catalog. “Nothing could be less spontaneous than ‘El Jaleo,’ but Sargent makes us believe that we are witnessing an actual performance.”

The painting is alive with a rhythm that extends through the very fingertips of its alluring, slanting, pose-striking dancer. It helps that Sargent was himself a supremely talented musician. As part of his international and idiosyncratic upbringing, Sargent had studied Italian folk music in Florence and could play the mandolin, guitar, banjo and piano. There’s a deep musical knowledge embedded in Sargent’s brushstrokes, which ring like sonic vibrations, plucked and strummed to virtuosic perfection on canvas.

Although its subject left few written records, Sargent and Spain reconstructs the artist’s itineraries through his extensive creative output — which ultimately totaled some 225 Spanish-themed works along with sketchbooks, notebooks and the two hundred photographs he collected (and possibly snapped himself). Over thirty years Sargent covered nearly every corner of the country — from Camprodon and Santiago de Compostela in the north to Seville and Granada in the South, and what seems like most points in between. Along the way he collected architectural images of Madrid, Toledo, Córdoba, Salamanca, León, Tarragona and Granada. The exhibition curators have for the first time also identified photographs of Sargent himself working and traveling in Spain.

Sargent brought the lessons of this Spanish class even to paintings that seem far removed from the Iberian peninsula. Consider his “Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.” This masterpiece of 1882, now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (and regrettably absent from the current exhibition), was a commission he painted in Paris of the four daughters of a fellow expatriate artist. The subject matter says nothing of Spain, but the multi-centered composition with its dark figures in profile is a homage to “Las Meninas.” Just look to its “evocative shadows,” note Kilmurray and Ormond, “the complex relationships between artist, figures, and viewer.”

Writing in the October 1887 issue of Harper’s magazine, Henry James offers the final word on Sargent and Spain: “Mr. Sargent had spent several months in Spain, and here, even more than he had already been, the great Velázquez became the god of his idolatry… It is evident that Mr. Sargent fell on his knees, and that in this attitude he passed characteristic a considerable part of his sojourn in Spain.”

The Way of the Masks

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2022

The way of the masks

On the newly redone Northwest Coast Hall at the American Museum of Natural History.

The museum of today dislikes the museum of yesterday. That’s clear enough as the buildings, the collections, and the curators of the past are branded suspect and even denounced by the leadership of the present. Nowhere has this been more evident than at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. For years the institution has been on an apology tour for America and its relationship to nature and history, all the while turning the museum into a vitrine of virtue-signaling politics. Artifacts from its Hall of South American Peoples, such as the shrunken heads of the Shuar Indians of Ecuador, have been effaced from view. A diorama of “Old New York” depicting trade between the Dutch settlers and Lenape tribesmen has been graffitied over with content warnings. (“The scene offers only stereotypical representations and ignores how complex and violent colonization was for Native people.”) At the same time the museum has shown increasing contempt for its visitors, who must now queue outside for an hour or longer just to pass through a phalanx of security- and covid-theater.

Early this year this progressive onslaught reached a fever pitch as the institution jackhammered up the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt from the museum’s memorial rotunda that bears his name. This work by James Earle Fraser, based on Verrocchio’s grand equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni, had been an integral part of John Russell Pope’s original 1928 museum design (see “A classical illness” in The New Criterion of September 2020). I am still astonished the museum went through with this act of vandalism, which was an affront to the city, not to mention an insult to our twenty-sixth president. The museum has now deprived future generations of its own history as embodied in its art and architecture. It has also shown itself to be at the beck and call of the woke mob, when even those artifacts bolted to the pavement are no longer safe from erasure. As Ellen Futter, the museum’s director of the past three decades, has just announced her retirement, one can only hope that the censorious managerial class she represents will go the way of the dinosaurs.

Against the backdrop of our own tribal politics, the study of culture, in which the American Museum of Natural History was once an unapologetic leader, can still come as particular relief. Even as it now eats itself, the institution, in its founding mission, was an ark for the world’s traditional cultures at a moment when many of them were under threat or vanishing. At no time was this more evident than under the guidance of the anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942). Over a century ago the museum through his work preserved the customs and artifacts of the tribes of the Pacific Northwest in astonishing ways that continue to enrich us today. This preservation has been especially valuable as those tribes under Canadian jurisdiction faced a government that outlawed their rituals and destroyed their artifacts as a matter of policy for nearly a century. In 1899 Boas’s Northwest Coast Hall opened in the museum’s first wing. Today it remains the oldest exhibit on view, and in its original location. Now after a five-year renovation, the hall has reopened. The results should still remind us of the genius of Northwest Coast culture and the achievements of Boas and his colleagues in preserving it. At the same time the renovation signals troubling new directions for anthropological display.

The old Northwest Coast Hall. Photo courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

The ten nations that make up the Northwest Coast tribes—Tlingit, Haida, Nisga’a, Gitxsan, Tsimshian, Haíltzaqv, Nuxalk, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-cha-nulth, and Salish—at one time enjoyed an abundance of natural resources that allowed for the development of a richly artistic and performative culture. This abundance was celebrated through the “potlatch,” an elaborate social pageant where rank and status were conferred through the ritual sacrifice of some of these resources. As a field researcher in British Columbia, Boas did not just amass the tribal artifacts of the peoples living there. He also studied their tribal customs, in particular those around the potlatch. Working with George Hunt, an English-Tlingit guide married to a Kwakwaka’wakw native, in 1897 Boas published The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, an extensive monograph that recorded their ceremonies, songs, and language in relation to their artistic materials—in particular the transforming, animistic wooden masks of the Kwakwaka’wakw.

A map of the Northwest Coast tribes. Photo courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

The complexities of these native practices, especially the ritual destruction of resources, were used as justification by the Canadian government for banning the potlatch and subsequently confiscating and destroying their artifacts, through laws that were in effect from 1884 to 1951. While motivated by the “best practices” of the age, which sought to assimilate native populations into Canadian culture, these statutes were an injustice that proved to be catastrophic for native art and custom.

It was the great ingenuity of Boas to work around Canada’s potlatch ban and complete his research. Rather than continue his field research in Canada, he arranged for Hunt and his extended family to live for seven months in 1893 in an ethnographic display as part of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he could study the Kwakwaka’wakw outside of Canadian jurisdiction.

When Boas’s hall opened in 1899, he carried through his deep understanding of Pacific Coast cultures while respecting their tribal specificity. Thanks to his extensive field research, he was able to exhibit their artifacts on their own terms, in separate alcoves dividing the hall that were dedicated to each nation and its social practices.

By today’s standards, Boas’s tenure at the museum was not without fault. A family of Greenland Inuits lived and died in his care at the museum in 1897. After staging a mock funeral for the benefit of the one boy, Minik Wallace, who survived, Boas in fact dissected his father’s body and placed it in the museum’s collection. Wallace dedicated his life to the return of these desecrated remains.

Boas’s approach to tribal research nevertheless revolutionized his field as he went on to found the department of anthropology at Columbia University. Zora Neale Hurston, a disciple of Boas at Barnard, applied his groundbreaking methodology to preserving the folkways of the black South. The structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss likewise credited Boas with inspiring his own methodology in the 1940s, leading to his 1975 book The Way of the Masks.

In some aspects of the new Northwest Coast Hall, the legacy of Boas can still be felt. The tribal alcoves have been roughly retained. The Haida dugout canoe known as the “Great Canoe,” which for decades resided in the museum’s Seventy-seventh Street entrance, has been restored to the center of the hall where it appeared when the room first opened. Extensive labels also now accompany the restored artifacts, with some one thousand objects now on display. In the Kwakwaka’wakw section, for example, these labels describe and explain the fool masks of the red-cedar-bark ceremonies and the transformation masks of the myth of Siwidi, an ancestor taken by a giant octopus to an undersea kingdom who returns transformed as a sequence of sea animals.

The “Great Canoe” in the Northwest Coast Hall. Photo courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

The problem with the new hall, and it is a big one, is in its curatorial voice. Some ten contemporary tribal members are listed here as co- and consulting curators. The results come off as exhibition by committee and anthropology as memoir. The wall labels are almost all presented in the first person. The distinctions between science and myth, subject and object, are nowhere maintained. “The Haíltzaqv people have lived on the central coast of British Columbia in and around Wáglísla (Bella Bella) since time began,” reads one wall text. “The case lighting has been darkened at the request of Tlingit advisors to reflect the cultural sensitivity of these items,” reads another.

The leadership at the museum is now so beholden to contemporary First Nations, or at least makes such a show of being beholden to them, that the presentation drowns out the very objects of history meant for display. “We need to talk about racism!” exclaims one introductory wall label in an extra-large font. “Systemic racism has been present here since first contact with white people and persisted to this current moment and this conversation,” goes the welcome video on repeat loop. On another wall, under the label “Support native art—made by Native artists,” we are given examples of decorated skateboards, sneakers, and basketballs.

For all of the verbiage now packed into this one hall—aimed at best obliquely at the museumgoer new to this cultural content—certain names and stories are notably absent. Gone is the remarkable history surrounding the transportation of that sixty-three-foot Great Canoe, the largest dugout canoe in existence, which until recently was included with its display. Created around 1878 from a single piece of Western red cedar, the canoe was acquired by the museum and moved by steamer to the isthmus of Panama, where it was transported by rail to the Atlantic, then shipped to a Manhattan pier, then moved to the new museum by horse-drawn wagon.

Also absent is the story of Franz Boas himself. You might think that if you are telling a story of the survival of culture, you would include the role of the curator who saved it. It is unfortunate that today’s anthropology museum must scrub itself clean of its own fingerprints to create the illusion of native curatorial control. A display dedicated to the history of the hall would make for a genuinely revelatory introduction.

Instead we now learn almost exclusively of the museum’s historical mistakes. “An anthropologist working for the Museum recorded scant information about this carved house post when it was taken in 1909 from Haida territory in Alaska,” says one label. “Beginning in the latter half of the 1800s, anthropologists and other unsanctioned ‘collectors’ took the belongings and stole the actual bones of our Ancestors,” reads another. The only place Boas now appears, at least that I could find, is in the display of his remarkable 1896 model of the Kwakwaka’wakw village of Xwamdasbe’—“the earliest model of its kind still in existence,” reads the label. The text then proceeds to point out the model’s elisions and inaccuracies.

Today’s Northwest Coast Hall dwells in the present at the expense of the past. Lost finally in this modern-day political potlatch is a spirit of appreciation for the ancestors of anthropology. This is a sin of omission that rests on today’s museum leadership and its misleadingly selective use of native voices, not on these voices themselves.

Five years ago, Garfield George, the head of the Raven Beaver House of Angoon, Tlingit, accompanied at the podium by his young daughter, Violet Murphy-George, gave a dedication at the museum that deserves to be remembered. Since these words appear nowhere in the new hall, I reproduce them here:

In 1882 they set our canoes on fire, set our village on fire. Our food caches. But the canoe prow was taken care of by this great institution. It was one of the only canoes to survive the bombardment and was used to gather food. Gather materials. It was the canoe that saved us. Someone asked me recently if it is hard to see these objects in this museum. The answer is yes, it is, but it survived.

Today’s Northwest Coast Hall is a testament to all of those who worked for this survival—acknowledged and otherwise.